If anyone has any feedback on PiBakery, I'd love to hear it!
I see it's not possible to allow user-configuration when the block is being installed, is that something on your road map? Is it possible to have any sort of periphery checking (e.g. does the pi have a camera attached).
Not that it'll matter much either way, I mean you can just set the block up and have it fail gracefully, but I thought I'd ask.
Nice work though - looks really great!
If I have some free time, I may experiment with adding "if" blocks in - although the main disadvantage is that this wouldn't be backwards compatible with previous PiBakery versions, and that's fairly important to me. But I'll see how things go.
That said, I am looking into an "if" block and then reporter blocks for it, and it may happen in the future.
Maybe take a look at the various debian bootstrap methods then you can create minimal sd-images and even apply some changes to the root fs and partition table before booting the rpi.
This way you could implement encryption of the root partition or specification of partition size etc.
Here is one of the many bootstrap methods: http://liw.fi/vmdebootstrap/
I will be doing the same process with Raspbian Lite (as having a minimal image is the most wanted feature) and allowing users to choose whether they want to use Full or Lite when writing to SD.
Maybe cygwin can help here? Or run this stuff on a virtual system, vagrant, virtual box, qemu... I have no idea how to do this in windows/macos.
Or encourage your users to just ditch those proprietary systems ;)
This svg Octocat is 7kb and CC-Attribution-3.0, but it's only the first one I found: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PEO-octocat-1.svg
Thanks so much for the hard work on PiBakery, it seems great!
I think you should add a bigger "Download" button to your download documentation (i.e. here: http://www.pibakery.org/docs/install-mac.html).
It's good to have the explanation for beginners, but for people that just want to get the software (and kind of know what they're doing) there should be a bigger button in addition to the text link. :)
Otherwise it looks good :) Anything that helps lower the barrier to entry for kids and other new comers to the rpi is a good thing in my book.
One benefit of this, over doing it online: you can download the file+program, disconnect from the net, and customize as many versions of the image as you'd like without extra bandwidth use. There are a lot of Pi users with limited internet access.
Another benefit: Doing it online implies at least a two step process. Go to the site and build a setup (with either an account system or an import/export feature to save progress and make it available for re-use), tell it to build the image, download it, and use a separate program to flash. Doing it through a native app eliminates the separate program and the question of whether or not you need to create an account on their service. Plus, when their site goes down eventually, I've still got a working, independent program. When they introduce a new version, I've got the option to stick with what I've got or upgrade (if I judge it to actually be an upgrade).
Web apps have their place. This thing is one that makes more sense as a local app to me.
What exactly do you mean by encrypted pi? The entire SD encrypted, one partition encrypted, or something else? If you have a script that does something like this, feel free to submit a block for it (guide at http://www.pibakery.org/docs/contribute.html) or send me the script and I can add it in for you.
Thanks for your interest in PiBakery!
Great product will definitely be using this today!